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<h2><a name="SECTION0025260000000000000000"></a><a name="doctest-advanced-api"></a>
<br>
23.2.6 Advanced API
</h2>

<p>
The basic API is a simple wrapper that's intended to make doctest easy
to use.  It is fairly flexible, and should meet most users' needs;
however, if you require more fine-grained control over testing, or
wish to extend doctest's capabilities, then you should use the
advanced API.

<p>
The advanced API revolves around two container classes, which are used
to store the interactive examples extracted from doctest cases:

<p>

<ul>
<li><tt class="class">Example</tt>: A single python statement, paired with its
      expected output.
</li>
<li><tt class="class">DocTest</tt>: A collection of <tt class="class">Example</tt>s, typically
      extracted from a single docstring or text file.
</li>
</ul>

<p>
Additional processing classes are defined to find, parse, and run, and
check doctest examples:

<p>

<ul>
<li><tt class="class">DocTestFinder</tt>: Finds all docstrings in a given module,
      and uses a <tt class="class">DocTestParser</tt> to create a <tt class="class">DocTest</tt>
      from every docstring that contains interactive examples.
</li>
<li><tt class="class">DocTestParser</tt>: Creates a <tt class="class">DocTest</tt> object from
      a string (such as an object's docstring).
</li>
<li><tt class="class">DocTestRunner</tt>: Executes the examples in a
      <tt class="class">DocTest</tt>, and uses an <tt class="class">OutputChecker</tt> to verify
      their output.
</li>
<li><tt class="class">OutputChecker</tt>: Compares the actual output from a
      doctest example with the expected output, and decides whether
      they match.
</li>
</ul>

<p>
The relationships among these processing classes are summarized in the
following diagram:

<p>
<div class="verbatim"><pre>
                            list of:
+------+                   +---------+
|module| --DocTestFinder-&gt; | DocTest | --DocTestRunner-&gt; results
+------+    |        ^     +---------+     |       ^    (printed)
            |        |     | Example |     |       |
            v        |     |   ...   |     v       |
           DocTestParser   | Example |   OutputChecker
                           +---------+
</pre></div>

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